Weston-house reverie; Hal's degrading recall and lexical lag

texture · 20 Nov YDAU

• When: 20 Nov YDAU (present reverie)
• What: Lying supine, Hal reconstructs the family's old Weston late-Victorian in fragmentary "tableaux" and confronts the erosion of his once-total recall: "I do not have Mario's head for remembered detail," and "I could not distinguish my own visual memories of the Weston house from my memories of hearing Mario's detailed reports of his memories." Word-retrieval now lags — "specular" and "foreshortened" surface only after he stops chasing them — and he notes with quiet alarm, of a forgotten object, "There had been a time when data like these were instantly available." Interwoven: the origin of JOI's film-obsession (Himself filming the '98 blizzard from the HmH window during E.T.A.'s first year, serially moving from optics to tennis-pedagogy to film) and JOI's late withdrawal from Avril. A memory-forgetting counterpoint to the eidetic-prodigy events elsewhere (see events 49, 104).